Professional Writing Services from MagneticWeb

Following on from my previous entry, I’m still on the subject of quality content, and the lack of it on so many web sites and blogs.

You may have come across it yourself. You click through to a site where you believe there will be some useful information about a subject you’re researching, and instead of reading something you can understand and follow, you find yourself reading complete nonsense.

How can people produce such stuff and then stick it up on their blog without bothering to read it? Or perhaps they did read it in many cases but still decided to put it up. Either way, it says something about what they think of their visitors.

It’s not just article spinners, which I mentioned briefly in the last posting on 25th May. It’s also another piece of software called “Automatic Content Providers”. These clever programs scour the internet, at the click of a button, for any articles, videos, images or audio files that are on the topic specified. The user then collects and slaps them up on his page, often without even looking at them.

Of course this can be done not just for the user’s own site or blog, but as a “service” for others. A lot of money can be earned by someone pretending to be able to provide valuable content for your site or blog. But if they use these article spinners or automatic content providers then they’re simply obtaining money by false pretences, and not providing a genuine service. Once their customers find out what is happening the game is up and these fraudsters have to look for a fresh lot of victims.

So the moral is to be very careful when you select a content provider for your web site or blog. Make sure you’re getting genuine, original content written by the person you believe to be writing it. No article spinners or automatically generated content.

Philip Gegan

See PhilipGegan.com for writing services that I can supply.

Two things have struck me in recent days while I’ve been researching on the internet. First, the number of different blogs that have on them exactly the same article. And, regrettably, few if any of them have carried the author’s bio box, thereby robbing the author of a link to his or her web site or blog.

The second thing is how badly written most of the blog entries are. In fact I’ve come to realise that many of them are not actually written at all. They’re “spun” by a software program, which takes an article written by a human being and “spins” it so as to appear different to the search engines and article directories, even though it is essentially the same article as the original. It just appears at first glance to be different.

What’s the purpose of this? Well, it enables the original writer of the article to post it, not just once with just one link to his site or blog, but many times, with multiple links to his site or blog, therefore giving it a “boost” in its search engine ranking with a resultant increase in visitors and paying customers.

All article spinners do is take the original article and substitute various words in it for other words with the same meaning, so as to make it a “different” article. But really nothing has changed. No new information or viewpoint has been added. Nobody will gain any additional knowledge or information by reading it. Multiply this by many times – some article spinners boast of being able to “spin” an article by as many as 50 times – and we can see how the internet is being clogged up with drivel.

Take this as an example. I found this recently when researching an alternative health topic.

“To minimize the attack of hay fever, work out a check on what assortment of plants provide off their pollen in the year and while they are flying active during the season within your field of the world, try avoid being outdoors as much as viable. Honey contains pollen as well so maintain away from them.

Hay fever could be treated at home as fine. Prepare 8 oz warm salt water using 2 tablespoons of table salt and gargle it to decrease sore throat.

There are some kinds of medicines obtainable in the pharmacy or supermarkets and always follow a information on a actuality leaflet.”

Can you make sense of this? No, I couldn’t either. In fact it was a pain reading it. The trouble is that software can automatically change certain words but can’t judge whether the resulting sentence makes any sense.

For example the first “the” should be “an”, the word “assortment” was probably “kind” originally, the word “provide” was probably “give”, and “field” was probably “part”. The word “fine” in the first sentence of the second paragraph was “well” in the original article, and so on. As you can see, there are plenty more examples in this short extract.

So an article that made sense as originally written has been turned into gobbledegook by an article spinner, and the person who wrote the original article (or, more likely, stole the original article) has been too lazy to go through the output and make any corrections.

All this is a great pity because it devalues the internet as a source of information.

This is a call for everyone to shun article spinners. They add no value to any article or to the internet as a whole and in the long run they won’t enrich anyone who uses them. They’re a fraud.

Agreed? Let’s hear the views of everyone else out there.

Philip Gegan

What is is that we all want to achieve with our web sites or blogs? There are a number of things, mostly, but what is the one thing above all others that we want from our online presence?

It must be that we want to spread the word about ourselves, or our business, or hobby, or whatever it is that is the focus of our web site.

Of course a business owner wants to make sales and profit, and a hobbyist wants to share his passion, but the only way they can do these things is by promoting knowledge of their existence in the online world. And that means telling people.

What people? Well, your visitors. But how do you get visitors? At this point I could launch into a long posting about search engines, social networking, and so on, but all I want to say here is that whatever means you employ to attract visitors to your web site they have to be persuaded of something.

They have to be persuaded that, before anything else, your site has something for them, most probably information. It may be information on how to solve some problem they have, or it may be simply to find the cheapest price for something they plan to buy offline.

Whatever it is, you have to persuade them that your site is where they can find it. And not only that, but that your site is also somewhere they ought to return to regularly for more information, and that their friends too ought to know about it. In other words, they have to be satisfied that your site is good for them, and a good place for their friends to visit.

You can only do that by regularly posting content that is of value to your target market, whether you’re an online marketer selling information or a keen sportsman or woman promoting your chosen sport.

So whatever you do with your web presence, it’s all about spreading the word.

If you need someone who can spread the word for you through articles, blog posts or simply Twitter entries, then just contact me at magneticweb@yahoo.com.

Philip Gegan

Yes, I know. It should be the Three R’s. And that apostrophe shouldn’t be there – but it does make the phrase more easily recognised.

I’ve nothing against Arithmetic, in fact I enjoy it, but here I’m only referring to Reading and Writing. And this short blog entry is in honour of them, because without them where would we all be?

The development of language and writing is one of the essential ingredients of civilization. Reading and writing skills are essential in order to take part in even the simplest activities, and it is through them that we are able to articulate our thoughts and ideas.

I love reading and writing and couldn’t live without either. I’m thankful that I received a good education, especially in the subject of English. It has not only made my life so much more enjoyable but has enabled me to practise as a lawyer and, later on, run a business providing writing services to others.

Armed with these two skills, any one of us can find out almost anything we want. In earlier times we had public libraries where we could research on almost any subject under the sun. Now we have the internet, so we don’t even have to leave our homes, as long as we have a computer and an internet connection. And if we don’t, there are internet cafes.

It’s easy to take reading and writing for granted, but we must never forget the incredible advantage in life that anyone has once they have mastered these skills in their own language (and even more so if they learn other languages as well). But so many people stop improving their skills once they leave school (or even before).

They go through life with only the most basic ability in reading, writing and communicating generally. Often their vocabulary is limited to just a couple of hundred words, and the only reading they do is restricted to the tabloid press, with more pictures than words, and the TV listings.

This is a great pity. I know we can’t all love the same things (or, as my old headmaster used to say, we’d all want the same wife), but if the standard falls below a certain point, and if the standard in various other essential ingredients of civilization falls similarly, then we’re in the same situation the Romans were in around the year 400 AD.

So I urge everyone to keep reading and keep writing, because what you don’t use nature has a tendency to take away from you. And certain sinister forces are at work to take your freedoms away, as I said in my two previous blog posts, so be vigilant. Let’s keep our ten billion words plus one.

Beware of anyone who wants “hate sites” or anything of a similar nature to be “closed down in the interests of good community relations”. They want to abolish (even more of) your hard-won freedoms and entrench their own power over you. And the ability of ordinary folk to read and write are in their way.

So in the interests of freedom – long live the two R’s – the widespread ability to read and write exactly what we like.

Philip Gegan

How many words have been published on the internet?

Impossible to say, of course, and more words are being added every second at such a rate that it would be impossible to keep count. And it doesn’t matter anyway. But something else does matter.

And that is that all those billions of words are in exercise of the basic freedom of speech that most of us in the West take for granted. A freedom which our fathers and grandfathers marched off to war to defend. But that freedom is again under attack and we must defend it at all costs.

The diabolical Hidden Hand that would deprive us of this right uses the pretexts of pornography and so-called “hate sites” as an excuse to call for “control” (i.e. censorship) of the internet. But if they were genuinely concerned about pornography they could make it a crime and use the powers of governments to smash the criminal syndicates that run this ugly industry.

And as for “hate sites”, like “hate crimes” they exist only in the hidden agendas of these evil people, who will pin the “hate” label on anyone they disagree with but are afraid to engage in open debate (because they know they would lose).

If the Hidden Hand had their way, all the billions of words uploaded onto the internet would be worth nothing, for they would all have been written with an eye to keeping within the limits imposed by the thought police.

Only one word is worth anything, and that word is . . .

Freedom.

Let’s make sure we don’t lose it.

Philip Gegan

When I was a small boy and my mother read me the story about the Emperor’s new clothes I was intriegued by the notion that so many people could be made to see something that wasn’t there just because they would otherwise be made to look foolish.

Whenever I heard mention of the story later in life I regarded it as just another silly children’s fable that wasn’t meant to be taken seriously, that it didn’t matter if it made no sense.

But in recent years I’ve changed my mind. I believe Hans Christian Andersen, who
wrote that story, was making at least one profound statement. Apart from exposing the hypocracy of many sections of the aristocracy in his own country (Denmark) at the time, he was mocking the conceit of most people, and their acceptance of popular falacies in order to boost their own social standing.

Hence the readiness of everyone (except the child, who had no social ambitions or restraints) to pretend to see clothes that weren’t really there.

It’s the same with the cult of “political correctness”. How many people who regard themselves as politically correct, and who go out of their way to ensure others in their social group know of their conformity, really believe in the things they’re supposed to believe in? And how many just go along with these usually stupid beliefs for the sake of blending in with everyone else and preserving their careers and pensions?

This is one of the things the internet is helping to break down, but there is only limited time to do it. The enemies of freedom of speech and expression are working hard day and night to censor the internet and prevent any kind of dissident expression.

So whatever you write on your web site or in your blog, or in forums or on notice boards, write what you really think is right, what you really believe in. Exercise your freedom to express yourself as you want. Don’t allow yourself to be bullied into conformity.